Beginnings of the opposition in the interior of Spain In the interior of Spain the first two organizations of the
defeated side to reorganize were the
CNT and the
PCE, even though the conditions in which they did so were harsh: "an environment marked by hunger and disease, with thousands of people in prison or awaiting execution, while others made the traces of their Republican past disappear to avoid arrest and where the majority of the population depended for their subsistence on the
straperlo, thus increasing their vulnerability towards the pressures of the state". Therefore, in both cases the clandestine activity was focused on helping their imprisoned militants and their families, providing them with money and seeking ways to free them or reduce their sentences, and giving shelter to those persecuted by the police. However, the first unitary organization of the opposition to Francoism, the
Spanish Democratic Alliance (ADE), was promoted by a group of exiled Republicans and its board of directors, constituted in the summer of 1940, was based in London. However, "the ADE was little more than a front for the activities of the British secret information services and their Spanish collaborators in the interior". It had a short life because the Francoist police managed to infiltrate the organization and arrested some 200 people in Valencia, Madrid and other cities —ten were sentenced to death of which three were shot in
Paterna in November—. After the
invasion of France, the network of ADE agents, which operated from the
Midi, was dismantled, and the British government ceased to support it so it disappeared at the end of 1940. As for the anarchists, the first interior committee was formed by
Esteban Pallarols, who had managed to escape from the
Albatera camp, and who was in charge of creating a clandestine network to move to France the prisoners he managed to get out of the concentration camps by means of false documents. Pallarols was arrested by the police and condemned to death, being shot on July 18, 1943. He was replaced by
Manuel López López, but he resigned soon after due to tuberculosis he had contracted during his stay in the Albatera camp, and was replaced by
Celedonio Pérez Bernardo. He was also arrested, tried in September 1942 and sentenced to thirty years in prison. He was replaced by
Manuel Amil Barcia, but he, stalked by the police, had to leave Madrid to take refuge in Andalusia, so the functions of the national committee were taken over by the Madrid organization headed by Eusebio Azañedo, who contacted the CNT of Valencia, which had been reorganized, and the CNT of Catalonia, whose situation was rather unclear due to the existence of two regional committees. As a result of the denunciation of a confidant, Acebedo was arrested in Madrid in the summer of 1943, so Amil returned to the capital to take charge again of the general secretariat of the national committee. '', in the Almudena cemetery in Madrid. As for the communists, the first organization of the party that was formed in hiding was in Madrid, where just after the end of the war a provincial committee was formed, headed by
Matilde Landa and made up of several militants, some of them young members of the
JSU. Some of its members were arrested by the police, who had obtained the files of the communist youth organization, being accused without any proof of having been preparing an attack against General Franco for the Victory Parade to be held on May 19, so a military court sentenced them to death and they were shot. Others were accused of being involved in the attack against Major Isaac Gabaldón, when he was traveling in his car near
Talavera de la Reina. On August 4 a first summary court-martial was held in Madrid in which 65 of the 67 accused were condemned to death, being shot the following day; 63, among them thirteen young women, some of them minors, who would be known as "
Las trece rosas".
Matilde Landa was also arrested, as well as Enrique Sánchez and José Cazorla, leaders of the JSU, who had formed the first "delegation of the central committee" —the term used to refer to the clandestine communist leadership of the interior of Spain—, Sánchez and Cazorla were while Landa saw the sentence commuted to 30 years in prison, but in mid-1942 she could no longer withstand the psychological pressure to which she was subjected by the prison guards and the management of the Palma de Mallorca prison and committed suicide. The next attempt of the PCE to provide itself with an underground leadership was the work of
Heriberto Quiñones, who escaped from the Albatera camp. Quiñones formed the Interior Committee in May 1941, which also included
Luis Sendín and Julio Vázquez —the latter was arrested by the police on July 16, being replaced by
Realino Fernández López Realinos, of the
Communist Party of Euskadi—. Around the same time, mid-May, several communist cadres sent by the PCE leadership in Mexico arrived in Lisbon to take charge of the organization of the interior. But four months later the Portuguese police arrested the "Lisbon group" and the Spanish police arrested Quiñones' committee along with two hundred more communist militants. Quiñones himself was arrested on December 30, 1941, in Madrid's Alcalá Street along with
Ángel Garvín, who had taken the place of
Realinos —detained earlier— in the interior leadership. All the captured interior leaders were condemned to death and shot, as well as the members of the "Lisbon group", who had been extradited to Spain, except for one of them who would die in prison in 1947. The reaction of the PCE leadership in exile to this incident was to accuse Quiñones of being a traitor who had denounced his comrades of the "Lisbon group" to the police. To this very serious accusation was added that of "
Trotskyist" —the worst label a communist could receive in the times of
Stalinist orthodoxy—. After the defeat of Quiñones, Jesús Bayón, a former collaborator of his, took over the communist leadership in the interior, which also included other former "quiñonistas" who had managed to evade arrest, such as Calixto Pérez Doñoro. In June 1942, Bayón was replaced by
Jesús Carreras, sent by the PCE leadership in France, whose influence was increasingly felt in the organization in the interior through the work of
Jesús Monzón and his deputy
Gabriel León Trilla who had rebuilt the PCE in the
French Midi, then under the
collaborationist regime of Vichy, and whose press organ, published clandestinely from August 1941, carried the title of
La Reconquista de España (The Reconquest of Spain). Nevertheless, in February 1943, Carreras, betrayed by a police informer, was arrested in Madrid and tortured, and after him the rest of the national leadership in Madrid, including Bayón and Pérez Doñoro, and an important number of active communist militants, as well as the top brass of the JSU. For the second time in less than two years the PCE saw its internal organization dismantled. The socialists took much longer to reorganize than the anarchists and communists. The first nucleus to be reconstituted was that of the
Basque Country as a result of the clandestine work of
Nicolás Redondo Blanco and
Ramón Rubial. In
Asturias, where repression was stronger due to the greater presence of the Guardia Civil and the Army fighting the
maquis, the first provincial committee was not formed until 1944. In Madrid a third socialist nucleus was formed under the impulse of
Sócrates Gómez.
Republican opposition in exile Diego Martínez Barrio managed to gather a good part of the left-wing republicans in exile —
Unión Republicana, Izquierda Republicana, and
Partido Republicano Federal— with the creation in Mexico of the
Acción Republicana Española, whose first manifesto was made public on April 14, 1941, the tenth anniversary of the
proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, in which he ended by calling on the Western democracies to help overthrow Franco because "without a free Spain a free Europe will not be possible". The fundamental point on which the proposal of the ARE diverged from that of the socialist Indalecio Prieto, who had displaced the "
Negrinista" sector from the leadership of the PSOE and the UGT, was that it advocated the reconstruction of a republican government that would present itself to the allies as an alternative to Franco, while the latter advocated the holding of a referendum on the form of government to attract the support of the monarchists. , leader of the "collaborationist" sector of the
Libertarian Movement, when he was Minister of Justice in
Largo Caballero's government during the
Spanish Civil War. The anarchists also carried out their own unification process initiated before the end of the war with the creation in France on February 26, 1939, of the
Libertarian Movement, made up of the
CNT, the
FAI and the
FIJL. But in the spring of 1942 the Libertarian Movement in exile experienced a serious crisis with the outbreak of latent tensions since the end of the war between the "collaborationists" led by
Juan García Oliver and
Aurelio Fernández, and the "apolitical" who supported the Paris-based national council presided over by
Germinal Esgleas and
Federica Montseny. At a meeting held in Mexico the former presented a document for discussion entitled "Ponencia" but were defeated, so they decided to form their own organization, a new
CNT, which had as its press organ the CNT newspaper, while the spokesman of the "anti-collaborationists" was
Solidaridad Obrera. The Communists since the
signature of the German-Soviet pact in August 1939 remained isolated from the rest of the Republican opposition forces by defending a policy based on the consideration of
World War II as an "imperialist war" in which the Spanish people should not intervene. Only after the
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 they began to break their isolation by defending now that the world war was a war of aggression by the Nazis to "liquidate, one by one, all the free countries", among which the communists included the Soviet Union, "to achieve their yearning for hegemony in the world", as was explained in an article published in
Nuestra Bandera with the significant title of "Let us make of all Spain a great front against Franco and against Hitler". Consequently, on August 1, 1941, the PCE proposed the formation of a "National Union of all Spaniards against Franco, the Italo-German invaders and the traitors" which would unite all Spaniards without distinction, so that the call was also addressed to the monarchist military and to all conservative elements who wanted to distance themselves from Franco's policies. The first outcome of this new doctrine was the
Spanish Democratic Union (UDE), formed in Mexico in February 1942 and made up of the PCE and the "
negrinista" sectors of the PSOE and the UGT, the
Republican Left (IR), the
Republican Union (UR), the
Federal Republican Party (PRF) and the
Unió de Rabassaires —on the other hand, the Catalan communists of the
PSUC formed in May their own UDE under the name of Aliança Nacional de Catalunya (ANC)—. Yet in September 1942 the PCE took a new turn in its policy by making public a manifesto in which neither the government of
Juan Negrín nor the
1931 Constitution was mentioned and instead it proposed the holding of "democratic elections" to constitute a "
constituent assembly to draft the constitutional charter that would guarantee the freedom, independence and prosperity of Spain". According to Hartmut Heine, this new turn was a response to Stalin's policy of considering the Iberian Peninsula "as an indisputable part of the sphere of influence of the West or, rather, of England". Juan Negrin responded by parting with the communists, as did the republican refugees in Great Britain. Thus in February 1943 the UDE was dissolved. However, the Socialists and the "
negrinista" Republicans, unlike Negrin himself, did not completely sever their ties with the PCE. , president of the Republican Courts in exile and founder of
Acción Republicana Española. On the initiative of
Diego Martínez Barrio, on November 20, 1943, the
Junta Española de Liberación was presented in Mexico, made up of the "prietista" socialists and the republicans of the ARE, which constituted "the first relatively broad alliance of the republican forces in exile" since the end of the civil war. However, the JEL did not bring together all the anti-Francoist forces in exile, since the PCE and the "
Negrinista" socialists and republicans had been left out of it. For its part, the PCE promoted the
Unión Nacional Española, which sought to bring together all anti-Francoist forces, both republican and monarchist. The
liberation of France in the summer of 1944 led the UNE to consider that the time had come to launch the invasion of Spain once the Germans had abandoned the border posts and had been replaced by members of the
Gendarmerie Nationale. The operation devised by
Jesús Monzón and his political and military advisors consisted of a frontal attack on the border defenses of the Pyrenees to establish several
bridgeheads of "liberated Spain", which was to provoke a popular insurrection throughout the country. It was codenamed
Operation Reconquista de España and was to involve some 9,000 Spanish members of the French
maquis, integrated since May 1944 in the
Spanish Guerrilla Grouping (AGE). The operation began between October 3 and 7 with the invasion of the
Roncal Valley, followed a week later by the incursion into the sector between
Hendaye and
Saint Jean-Pied-de-Port, in the
Basque Country, but in both cases the guerrillas encountered strong resistance and ended up retreating a few days later. On October 17 the main attack began in the
Aran Valley by a force of 3,000 to 4,000 guerrillas under the command of
Vicente Lopez Tovar, but they also had to retreat, and only a small number managed to save the siege and integrate into the
maquis groups operating in the interior of Spain. The political bureau of the PCE held
Jesús Monzón responsible for the disaster and ordered the end of the UNE, although it was not officially dissolved until June 25, 1945. Monzon, fearing for his life, disobeyed the peremptory order to return to France and wandered around the interior of Spain until he was arrested and sentenced to thirty years in prison. His closest collaborator,
Gabriel León Trilla, was assassinated in Madrid on September 6, 1945, by communist agents carrying out orders from the PCE leadership. The same fate befell two other "
Monzonist" cadres: Alberto Pérez Ayala was assassinated in Madrid on October 15, 1945; Pere Canals as soon as he crossed the French border. That same month of October 1944 the agreement reached between libertarians, anarchists and republicans of the interior was made public, which created the
National Alliance of Democratic Forces (ANFD) whose objective was the formation of a provisional government that would reestablish democratic liberties and call general elections, for which it was willing to make a pact with the monarchist forces without putting as a condition the restoration of the
Republic. Thus, during the last months of 1944, the three members of the ANFD national committee maintained contacts with the monarchist generals
Aranda,
Kindelán,
Saliquet and
Alfonso de Orleáns y Borbón, all of them convinced that
Franco's regime would not survive the defeat of the
Axis powers. However, the discussions soon reached a dead end as the generals wanted the forces represented in the ANFD to accept the restoration of the monarchy without forming a provisional government and without a referendum on the form of government. The final failure of these attempts was due above all to the wave of arrests carried out by Franco's police at the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, which led to the imprisonment of the leaders of the ANFD, the national committee of the
Libertarian Movement and the executive of the PSOE, as well as prominent monarchist politicians who had maintained contacts with them. , who managed to prevent the Republican Courts from approving the formation of a National Council of the Republic, which would act as a government in exile. The month after the founding of the ANFD, Martinez Barrio announced in Mexico the convocation of a meeting of the Republican Courts, the first since the end of the civil war, for January 10, 1945, with the objective of creating a National Council of the Spanish Republic. Seventy-two of the 205 living in exile attended (104 resided in Spain, and 88 had died in the war, 60 executed by the rebel side and 28 by the Republican side). The "prietista" socialists argued that there was not enough
quorum to validate the meeting —they refused to count the 49 deputies who had not been able to attend but who had joined in writing— so the creation of the National Council of the Spanish Republic could not be approved and the next scheduled meeting was postponed
sine die. addressing the participants in the
San Francisco Conference, from which the
Franco regime was excluded, and which was attended by prominent Republican politicians as guests. Thus, when the
Yalta Conference was held, between February 4 and 11, 1945, there was no such thing as a provisional republican government. Armour immediately informed the Spanish Foreign Minister of the contents of Roosevelt's letter. Thus the Franco regime was excluded from the
San Francisco conference that would lead to the creation of the UN, and to which Republicans in exile were invited as political observers. On June 19, the Conference approved a resolution proposed by the Mexican delegate, and with the support of the French and American delegates, which condemned all regimes that had arisen with the support of
Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy, a direct reference to the
Franco dictatorship.
Monarchist opposition ,
pretender to the
Spanish throne. After overcoming the
crisis of May 1941, the monarchist military began to pressure Franco to give way to the monarchy. In July of that same year they formed a junta made up of five generals presided over by General
Luis Orgaz,
Spanish High Commissioner in Morocco, although the
mastermind was
General Aranda. However, among the conspirators, who had been joined by prominent monarchist politicians such as
Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, there were numerous discrepancies both on the composition of the hypothetical provisional government that would be formed after Franco's abandonment of power —with a predominance of military men, as General Aranda defended, or of civilians as Sainz Rodríguez advocated— and on its objectives —Aranda was content with dissolving the Falange and Sainz Rodríguez defended the immediate restoration of the monarchy—. In the meeting held on November 22, several of the conspirators abandoned the idea of forming a provisional government or junta to support instead the constitution of a regency council to ensure the restoration of the monarchy. As this meant overthrowing Franco, several generals withdrew and, on the other hand, the British government, on whose support they had counted until then, did not want to commit itself either. Thus the conspiracy lost strength. during the
attack on Pearl Harbor. In December 1941, after the German failure in the capture of Moscow and the entry of the United States into the war due to the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor —which was congratulated by the Spanish government through a telegram to Tokyo—, the royalist generals again put pressure on
Generalissimo Franco at the meeting of the Army Council held on the 15th. And on January 26, 1942,
General Kindelán delivered a speech at the Captaincy General of Barcelona in which he asked the Caudillo for the restoration of the monarchy as the only means to achieve the necessary "conciliation and solidarity among the Spanish people". Franco, who was furious, did not react immediately and preferred to wait. In June 1942 he began to move and forced Sainz Rodriguez and
Eugenio Vegas Latapié, the two civilian ringleaders of the conspiracy, to leave the country. "The ideological affinities with
Acción Española were left behind and he presented himself as a man who longed to be the king of all Spaniards and not just of one side, and who considered his main mission to achieve the reconciliation of the nation, eliminating the causes that kept it divided". , member of the monarchist committee that was formed in March 1943 to promote the cause of
Don Juan de Borbón. The same day that the "Geneva manifesto" appeared, General Kindelán met with Franco in Madrid to ask him in his name and in the name of the rest of the monarchist generals (Gómez Jordana,
Dávila,
Aranda,
Orgaz,
Vigón and
Varela) to proclaim the monarchy and declare himself regent. "Franco gritted his teeth and responded in a conciliatory and sly tone. He denied any formal commitment to the
Axis, stated that he did not wish to remain any longer than necessary in a position that he found more unpleasant every day and confessed that he wanted Don Juan to be his successor". Two months later, he removed General Kindelán from his post as head of the Captaincy General of Catalonia, appointing him director of the Army College, which had no direct command over troops. He was replaced by the Falangist
General Moscardó. The spring of 1943 saw the first sign of the semi-clandestine campaign that was developed in favor of Don Juan. Leaflets appeared in Madrid, imitating postcards, in which a photo and the biography of the pretender appeared, together with a fragment of one of his speeches. Around the same time a monarchist committee was formed, made up of
Alfonso García Valdecasas,
Germiniano Carrascal,
Joan Ventosa i Calvell,
Manuel González Hontoria and
José María Oriol, representing the sector of the
Traditionalist Communion headed by the
Count of Rodezno. On June 15, 1943, 27
procurators of the
pro-Franco Cortes addressed a letter to Franco in which, in a flattering —"almost servile"— tone, they encouraged him to "crown his mission" by restoring the Monarchy. The
Caudillo's response was to remove them all from their official posts and to order the arrest of the promoter of the letter, the
Marquis of Eliseda. Another of the promoters —also considered as the material author of the letter—
Francisco Moreno Zulueta,
Count of the Andes, was banished to the
island of La Palma. The
fall of Mussolini on July 25, 1943, and the
armistice between Italy and the allied armed forces on September 3 gave a new impulse to the royalist cause. On August 2, Don Juan sent a telegram to General Franco urging him to abandon power and to give way to the Monarchy "because there is no time to lose", the events in Italy "can serve as a warning". General Franco immediately replied with another telegram that ended with a veiled threat: It was delivered by General Asensio although the initial idea had been that the request would be presented in person by General Luis Orgaz the previous month during a visit to the
pazo de Meirás. But Franco did not make the slightest concession and limited himself to wait and to place in key positions military men loyal to him. When he spoke with the lieutenant generals one by one, only Kindelán, Orgaz and Ponte remained firm in their position, while the others hesitated, and General Saliquet even told him that he had been pressured to sign. "By mid-October 1943 the storm had passed." In March 1944, a large group of university professors and lecturers wrote to the "king" Juan de Borbón: "In the Monarchy and in the person of Your Majesty is our hope for a stable Regime". Franco's response was to order the exile of four of the signatories, professors at the University of Madrid:
Julio Palacios,
Alfonso García Valdecasas,
Jesús Pabón and
Juan José López Ibor. Finally, after almost a year without having made any declaration, on March 19, 1945, Don Juan made public the
Manifesto of Lausanne in which he broke with Francoism. In it he stated that the Francoist regime "is fundamentally incompatible with the present circumstances being created in the world", that is to say, with the Allied victory, for which reason he asked Franco to make way for the "traditional Monarchy" since only it "can be an instrument of peace and harmony to reconcile the Spanish people". The manifesto was silenced by the Spanish press and radio, although it was broadcast by the
BBC. On March 25, Don Juan asked his supporters to resign from their posts, but only two of them did so: the Duke of Alba, who resigned from the embassy in London and who commented that Franco "only wants to support himself in perpetuity; he is infatuated and arrogant. He knows everything and trusts the international game recklessly"; and General
Alfonso de Orleáns y Borbón, Duke of Seville, who resigned from his post as inspector of the air forces. General Franco's reaction was immediate. He banished General de Orleáns to the estate he owned in Cádiz and sent two emissaries, the Catholics
Alberto Martín Artajo and
Joaquín Ruiz Giménez, to communicate to Don Juan the total support of the Army, the Church, the single party
FET y de las JONS and the majority of the monarchists for the Franco regime. On March 20 he summoned the Superior Council of the Army which met for three days and there he rejected Kindelán's request for the restoration of the monarchy — "As long as I live I will never be a queen mother", he told him—. == Opposition to Franco's regime from 1945 to 1950 ==